Joseph ii's rule in the Austrian Netherlands, and the opposition that he provoked there, have been intensively studied, and it is none too easy to find a new research topic in the field. Vandermersch has lighted on a subject that has not been the precise focus of a good study, although it can hardly be said to have been neglected. He has used a number of Belgian archival sources and has read quite widely in the international literature bearing on the theme. He has made particularly good use of the writings of a defender of the emperor, the abbé Dufour. His chief conclusion is that the bishops, whose careers and attitudes he describes well, were remarkably, perhaps culpably, passive in the face of most of Joseph's ecclesiastical legislation, which he characterises as aiming at the ‘nationalisation’ of the Church, the secularisation of politics and the fonctionnarisation of the clergy, i.e., turning them into state officials. Unfortunately, no doubt because of the wealth of material available, he has worked within serious constraints: he has decided that not only the bishopric of Liege, which in the 1780s was an independent state, but also what is now Luxembourg and was then part of the Austrian Netherlands, should be excluded. Joseph's policy for that province was especially important to him, and his attempts to get a bishopric established for it are obviously relevant to the theme of the book. Vendermersch seems to have read no records of the many provincial Estates and tells us very little about the active participation of the bishops in their proceedings. He discusses Joseph's monastic policies, which he appears to think more or less destroyed the monasteries by 1786, but ignores the role of the many powerful houses that survived to oppose the emperor's rule, raising, arming and even leading troops against him in the revolution of 1789. Though much of what the author says about the emperor's aims is just, they need to be studied in a wider context than that of Belgium, including questions of foreign policy other than the little war with the Dutch.